March 2013
abstract
Gérer & Comprendre
Issue 111
Editorial
By Pascal LEFEBVRE
OVERLOOKED
Collective negotiations in small and medium-sized companies: how to strategically manage the effects of workforce thresholds?
By Yvan BAREL
Maître de conférences habilité à diriger des recherches en Sciences de gestion, LEMNA (Laboratoire d’Economie et de Management de Nantes-Atlantique), Université de Nantes. Adresse courriel : yvan.barel@univ-nantes.fr
and Sandrine FRÉMEAUX
Professeur, Audencia.Nantes École de management. Adresse courriel : sfremeaux@audencia.com
Serious studies agree that small and medium-sized firms’ practices in human resource management are not very formalized. However few studies have focused on the “social dialog” between labor and employers there; and none has apparently sought to understand how the heads of such firms manage the effects of legally established thresholds related to the size of the workforce. Legal requirements with a bearing on collective negotiations differ significantly depending on the size of the workforce, their impact increasing when the workforce rises above certain thresholds (fifty wage-earners, for instance). Based on a qualitative survey, this article describes the attitudes of the heads of small and medium-sized businesses that have crossed or are about to cross such a threshold. There is agreement about the risk, at that point, of “fixing the books” and of increasing conflict and “technicization” in labor relations. Light is shed on the practices of “cooperative” company executives who try to manage the “social dialog” in a strategic way.
Environmental risks in between forgetting and managing the past: a shut-down uranium mine in france
By Sophie BRETESCHÉ and Marie PONNET
Enseignant-chercheur
This description of how a uranium mine in western France was managed once it had been shut down draws attention to what was “left behind”. It emphasizes how the mine became something common, ordinary, since the work conducted there during the 1990s gradually erased evidence of the mining of uranium in France; and then it has become an uncommon form of memory owing to the emergence of traces of mining activities. This example provides a framework for broader questions about the effect of what is left behind in articulating past and present, and in the public construction of what is “memorable” in environmental management.
From proclaimed to effective safety: inventing “rules of usage”
By Gilbert DE TERSSAC
CERTOP-CNRS, Université de Toulouse 2
Using clinical interviews conducted with approximately thirty wage-earners of the AZF plant, which was destroyed by an explosion on 21 September 2011, this research exposes the processes used to improve safety and the contradictions in them. The documentation gathered and analyzed helps us understand how safety regulations were made for producing chemical fertilizers. Besides the preliminary, formal, proclaimed regulations, a level of “effective safety” emerged out of the invention of “rules of usage”, which individuals worked out in situ and turned into a shared obligation: personal involvement in the safety improvement program, the appropriation of formal regulations, the understanding of incidents and accidents without trying to identify the person responsible, and the mutualizing of know-how about danger. Improving the effective level of safety did not, however, expel the risk of a catastrophe, proof of this being the explosion. This study forces us to think about the role of management in making regulations and, more broadly, in making norms from many sources coherent.
TRIAL BY FACT
The postures of combat and understanding in social liberation
By Claude QUANTIN
Sociologue, Consultant auprès des hôpitaux et établissements médico – sociaux
Sociologue, Consultant auprès des hôpitaux et établissements médico – sociaux Can people free themselves from their social determinants? For Pierre Bourdieu, only a deep socioanalysis of social conditioning can open the way to freedom. Clinical sociology, with reference to Vincent de Gaulejac, has criticized this approach for placing “combat” over “understanding” and thus blocking “reflexivity” and liberation. As this article points out, understanding plays a considerable but often overlooked role in Bourdieu’s work, along with combat. The conjunction of understanding and combat is present in every movement for social liberation, as shown herein on three different scales: symbolic violence between two subjects, macro- social domination, and clan oppression in an occupational group.
IN QUEST OF THEORIES
The family’s role in the strategy and governance of firms: sixty years in the history of a family firm
By Céline BARRÉDY and Julien BATAC
Pôle Universitaire des Sciences de Gestion, Bordeaux
Research on family businesses is growing strongly (Zellweger et al., 2010). Yet, the dynamics caused by the evolution of the family-business relationship over time (Gersick et al., 1997) on strategic directions remain little explored. This paper presents the originality to consider strategy in the family business by combining strategic analysis and governance of this specific form of business. The empirical study is based on a longitudinal case of a family business, Translog, established in 1946 and which provides access to sixty years of data, primary and documentary. The results show the existence of strategic episodes evolving with family dynamics and governance of the company, from the complete melting of the family and the business to the transformation of the family as a true and independent partner.
OTHER TIMES, OTHER PLACES
From “arrangement" to “organization", an essay on the means of management
By Thibault LE TEXIER
Groupe de recherche en droit, économie et gestion (GREDEG-CNRS)
The word “management”, before being used with regard to the government of private enterprises, commonly referred to the arrangements based on precise measurements and calculations for regularizing behavior. The engineers who claimed to be practicing scientific management at the turning point between the 19th and 20th centuries organized industrial labor by applying purportedly objective arrangements. The scope of what could conceivably be “arranged” started changing; not only were facts arranged, but the “arrangements” themselves too. Modern theorists of management have extended the application of managerial arrangements to the social structure of organizations and the subjectivity of individuals. By concentrating on the principle of “organization”, they have shown how important the “logic of arrangements” is for conceiving of the administration of firms. They have unconsciously paid their debt toward the authors of books on farms and household “management” during the 19th century.
Mosaics
The hidden side of triple a rating: an inside story
On Samuel Didier and Nicolas Weill’s, Les dessous du triple AAgences de notation: récit de l’intérieur (Omniscience, 2012)
By Thierry BOUDES
The logan epic
On Bernard Jullien, Yannick Lung and Christophe Midler’s L ’épopée Logan, Nouvelles trajectoires pour l’innovation (Dunod, 2012)
By Daniel FIXARI
A crisis in governance — business ethics and profit-seeking
On François Valérian’s Crise dans la gouvernance – Éthique des affaires et recherche du profit (2011)
By Dominique JACQUET
Managers, or the art of not motivating
On Daniel Pink’s La vérité sur ce qui nous motive (2009, translated by S. Leduc, 2011)
By Arnaud TONNELE
The new war of secession
On Thierry Pech’s, Le Temps des riches – Anatomie d’une sécession (Paris, Seuil, 2011
By Arnaud TONNELE